Estimating Heritability Using Twins. Luke Jostins lays out the A’s, E’s, and C’s. Very informative. This part was kind of funny though: “Interestingly, the Bioscience Resource Project post cites this paper, which makes their mistake somewhat surprising.” Wonder if Luke is making a reference to the tendency for people not to read papers they cite too closely.

One of the Sweden Bombs Exploded Prematurely. Looks like Sweden dodged a bomb here, more or less. But ~5% of Sweden’s population is Muslim (culturally or by practice), mostly from Middle Eastern countries. It cancels some of Sweden’s historic military neutrality out when you bring populations recently subject to political disturbance into the nation. I say some because Britain has recently combined worst of both worlds, importing in a culturally alienated population along with an adventurous high-risk foreign policy.

The Tragic Decline of Ivory Coast. Ivory Coast is a case of re-equilibrium and with feedback loops. Its economic prosperity drew migrants, who eventually became the source of political discord, which removed the economic prosperity which drew the migrants.

Why Most Hardware Specs Are Total Bullshit. ” A recent study in the Journal of Consumer Research suggests that quantitative specifications are so powerful that, even when given the ability to directly test the attributes of a given product ourselves, we still tend to choose the thing with the longer list and bigger numbers (ahem, megapixels).”

Caste, Hinduism and Human Rights. ” Contrary to the wide academic and media conflation of caste and Hinduism, the practice of caste-based discrimination is in direct contradiction to the quintessential Hindu teaching that each individual is equally divine and has the potential to realize God based on his or her own effort.” As an irreligious atheist I always roll my eyes when religious people claim that unpalatable practice Y which is strongly correlated with religion X is actually in total contradiction with X. But something like caste in Hinduism seems to be ameliorated much more by economic development than the fulminations by religious leaders.

Sexual Display and Mate Choice in an Energetically Costly Environment. ” We found that male guppies performed fewer sexual displays and became less choosy, with respect to female size, in the presence of a water current compared to those tested in still water. In contrast to males, female responsive to male displays did not differ between the water current treatments and females exhibited no mate preferences with respect to male size or coloration in either treatment. ”

“Asian Male Lead” – Keanu Reeves is beginning to look more and more Asian to me. Why do they never refer to his non-trivial amount of non-European ancestry in any of his movies?

http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/gnxp Razib Khan

he’s a ‘heartthrob.’ they don’t want to ruin the illusion

http://3lbmonkeybrain.blogspot.com/ Mike Keesey

The notion that crocodylians are morphologically conservative was dismissed decades ago. The only reason this is news is because people outside of of vertebrate paleontology haven’t been paying attention. (Well, and also because a detailed paper was recently published on a rather bizarre stem-crocodylian.)

“Living fossil” is a pernicious term, but you could create an objective definition for it: “a living taxon belonging to a clade in which the only previously-named taxa are based on fossils”. Of course, this means the category of “living fossil” is an artifact of our history of scientific nomenclature, not a true evolutionary category. Under this definition, living coelacanths and Laotian rock rats are living fossils, but crocodylians and monotremes are not.

The comments section of the Madoff article is hilarious, even if the joke is obvious.

http://lyingeyes.blogspot.com ziel

In case anyone wants to see what the Laotian Rock Rat Mike Keesey mentions looks like but doesn’t want to go thru the trouble of typing it into Google, here’s a link. You only have to go down one page to see the requisite image of Karl Rove.

diana

#2 – you saying that playing a gay rent boy (Private Idaho) doesn’t ruin the illusion, but being part E. Asian does? Very well. Gee, those E. Asian guys got it rough!

#5 – Yeah but he was “blacked up” for the part. It was in the grand tradition of playing against type.

KR has several times referred to himself as a “white boy”. Look at these pictures of a distinctly Asian/Polynesian kid….who grew up to be white. Weird!

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About Razib Khan

I have degrees in biology and biochemistry, a passion for genetics, history, and philosophy, and shrimp is my favorite food. In relation to nationality I'm a American Northwesterner, in politics I'm a reactionary, and as for religion I have none (I'm an atheist). If you want to know more, see the links at http://www.razib.com